OK, isn't Adobe supposed to be an Awesome design company???!!!

Surprise, surprise! It's 2023 and Cp still sucks! I had the "pleasure" of doing some closed captions (CC) recently with audio in Cp due to the ability of exporting CC, so that the text can be later translated. I ran into a problem: I needed to edit the timing and text of the CC. If you need to change the text in the slide notes, which later will be CCs you're in for a ride. If you edit the slide notes and re-generate the audio then all the work that was done with the timing will end up mixed, especially if you shorten the audio clips, because the markers will be put one on top of the other. Oh, and if the playhead value exceeds 8 seconds than instead of 00:00:09 you'll see 00:00.. for 9 seconds and up. Good luck being precise with synchronizing the captions. This is clearly a development bug. I found a way, but it was tedious and a little complicated, but it took to long. To be fair though, I do like the Speech Management tool, even though that too has a few shortcomings. Too bad Captivate wasn't more like InDesign in precision or an add on to it. Sorry for the wishful thinking.

This 10+ year old thread made my day!

Literally laughed out loud at some points.

Thanks for bringing it to the top! I probably never would have found it otherwise.

My 2¢...

I love Captivate!

Hi there!

Articulate Storyline/Figma/Long-time Adobe product user (all of 'em, whole suite) here to jump on this hilarious dogpile of a rant thread to update over 10 years later:

Captivate (2019) is still a bad program. I think it needs to be totally gutted and started over. Would be cool if it had collaborative capability like Figma, or if any of the hotkeys were the same as in adobe products. Also lots of the language used is unfamiliar (maybe it's outdated and I'm too young to know at the green green age of 30). Would love if the UI was just easier to use, and every single simple thing didn't require multi-steps....My clients constantly ask for page numbers, why does it take 10 steps to do that haha! Timeline anyone? Image cropping (no really, functional image cropping the way you can in PPT/Illustrator/Photoshop)? Instructional Design is HUGE especially with the pandemic in recent years..if this program was more efficient, I could work faster and take on more clients, or deliver things faster for happier clients. Feel like it's a total let down.

Speaks worlds that with no 3D experience, Blender was an easier program to learn and it's free. Apples to oranges, I know, but just consider how complicated 3D programs are while Captivate is essentially just Worse Powerpoint and they still managed to stub their toe and faceplant into some cowpie then charge over a grand. 

That is all ❤️ Sorry to join the dark side and give in to frustration in a public forum! I understand that Captivate is moving towards a subscription model and will be making some updates, but I am extremely skeptical that the updates will A) Be enough to justify a sub, and B) actually be as modern and fleshed out as other software already out there....

I know this thread is old, but I've decided to visit you all from the future. I'm currently using version 2019 (in 2020) and it stills sucks. I am an avid Adobe user and I think its very fair to compare one product to another from the same family. If Ferrari decided to make a total lemon and sell it for the same price as one of their flagship automobiles, that would be shameful.

I am a UX Designer (5 years) and I'm running the latest Macbook Pro. I am consistently plagued with frustrating issues using Adobe Captivate: performance, library organization, interface design, information hierarchy, timeline feature, transitions, interactive features, etc. Even if you don't compare it to Photoshop(I read the replies below), Premiere, or Articulate360, it's a bad product. Use Nielsen/Norman's heuristic evaluation template, organize a focus group, whatever you need to realize that in today's world of well-designed, easy to use, useful, functional applications – Adobe Captivate falls miles behind what it could be.

Put me on the team, I'll fix it.

Yes it's the worst program I use in my job and if I could boot it I would.

No, not all rapid authoring programs are bad - Articulate Storyline is excellent.

Here are a few of the things which suck about Adobe Captivate.

1) the styling groupings.

The Properties block to the right of the UI is user-hostile. What the hell are all the styling groups? Why do different ones appear at different times? Sucks. Horrible. I've been using this programme for more than 3 years and still don't know what the hell is going on here.

2) the resize feature DOESN'T EVEN WORK. When you resize a project and change the proportions, it can trim the regular slides, but none of the videos. I thought Captivate was supposed to SPECIALISE in screen recordings for simulations? That feature doesn't work - don't include it!

3) Random background shit appears all the time. That's the best way to describe it. No rhyme or reason. It will cut bits out from backgrounds and overlay them,or just randomly change the background.

4) The entire UI sucks. You could go into detail but why? It's like it hasn't been designed, it's just a collection of menus which appear wherever the backend coder left them.

Every programme which I use in the Creative Suite is great, I'm highly proficient in After Effects, Illustrator and PS. But Captivate is embarrassingly bad. Horrible to use and very difficult to create attractive work with, unless you import everything from another programme.

What I find incomprehensible about Captivate 9 is that its text box function still does not have the option to recognize a null response without resorting to java script. This is important if you want text entry boxes to have mandatory entries, versus users just hitting the return key every time and not entering anything. I've seen this same issue in other discussion from as far back as over a year ago. And its validate response option is useless for this since it has no way to store a null response. Yet, even when I got Captivate 9 to recognize a null value with  its Advanced Actions, it still  failed once in its HTML5 simulator. Moreover, while you can set maximum input length for a  new variable, so why not the minimum? At least then that might provide a simpler workaround. Articulate is looking more and more attractive at times like these.

I think Adobe is terrible at design because they don't have to be good. They are the biggest design company around and they have almost no competition. This being the case, what do they care if the design sucks. Look at Acrobat DC...that is a complete eye sore. I just visited behance.net and noticed that they change the setting page for projects. It used to be a single page that was easy to use and rather well done. Now it's three tabs that are clunky, needlessly separated and opens constant dialog boxes. It takes 3 times as long to do something that used to be easy and quick. You also have to flip between tabs to see what used to be displayed on a single page.

The people at Adobe have lost touch with good design because they just don't have to care. This is why you are having such a bad experience with Adobe Captivate.

*Puts video onto slide*

- Client brief stipulates the ability to replay the video when it finishes or continue to the next slide. No worries I'll just create a button to replay the slide.. not possible. Okay I'll just jump to the first frame of the current slide with a basic action. I can go to the previous slide, I can go to the next slide but I can't replay the current slide. No worries, 'jump to slide' must be the one I want? Nope, doesn't allow you to choose the current slide. Time for an advanced action to do something so seemingly fundamental, hack hack hack and finally I have something that works, yippee! 10 minutes to do something that should've taken 10 seconds. But wait, now the rollover effects on my smart-shape buttons which appear at the end of the video are all messed up? *Changes the smart-shape button on the time so it appears at: 0* and now it works.. so obviously my hacky workaround for replaying the current slide is causing issues *tries 3 other advanced action methods to replay slide* all cause the same rollover issue. I figure it must have something to do with the execution or setup of the scripted buttons when the slide opens. Okay, add a slide before the slide the video's on and set it for 0.1 second.. now set the "replay video" button to go to that previous slide and continue to the slide with the video, nobody will notice 0.1 second, I get a small flash, that's good enough right. Wrong. I'm hacking together workarounds because of the inability of the software to deliver what it should on a basic, fundamental level.

Having succeeded to add a replay button to my video slide (an hour later) I move on to add a quiz... oh hell no, don't get me started! I absolutely gave up at this point.

Long story short. This is supposed to be "rapid development software" yet at every step of the process (and I mean that very literally) I'm having to find ways to make things work because of poor functionality, inherent program limitations and/or bugs. In turn, there is nothing rapid about it. Not to mention the code it spits out is pretty ugly.

What Adobe needs to do is focus on making the application as it is, with what it offers... actually work. Stop adding new features and address all the issues this poor application is suffering. If it actually worked and you didn't feel like you had to fight it every step of the way, it'd be pretty darn good. As it stands I've spent vastly more time beating into submission than actually focusing on building a course.

Note to the community. I'm not going to argue my experience with Captivate, so please don't waste your time posting "if you want to create a replay button do this", or "I don't experience that bug maybe it's your setup" etc.

For now, I'll use Lectora or Storyline and keep a very close eye on Adapt Builder. I really hope that by Captivate 12 we're looking at a sharp, streamlined, ultra efficient version of what the software currently offers today, as opposed to a gazillion new features that kinda work and all the current features that, well.. kinda don't.

Ciao for now Captivate.

I have to say, I've just started using Captivate (8) and I agree with the post.  It's really not user friendly at all, and it fails to follow some basic things that I thought were pretty standard for Adobe products.  However, the criticism of being to vague is a valid one, so I will get specific.

My biggest problem is the timeline.  Now, call me spoiled, but I'm used to programs with a timeline actually displaying on the screen only those things that occur at the selected point on the timeline.  Captivate cannot seem to do this.  Perhaps there's something wrong with my installation?  I can't believe this feature is not actually present, and I'm having trouble understanding how anything can actually get done without this feature.  When I drag the slider, it does show the current image, but when I let it go, it reverts to a collage of every single item on the timeline.  It's really confusing.  Does anyone else have this problem?  Are people okay with this?

Other than that, it seems okay, though it was a bit of a pain to install.  For some reason I had to uninstall most of my fonts to get it to work.  I have plenty of Adobe products (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign) that work fine with my fonts ... not Captivate.  Strike 2!

I'm hoping the timeline issue can be resolved.  If not, I may have to quit my job.

I'm running CPT 8 latest version as of Feb 2015... Not by choice but because a client needed a course making in it.

I'm an avid fan of All of adobe's products and our company have multiple cloud licenses and rely on their excellent software for everything we do

Then I get to captivate...what an embarrassment Adobe.

I even attended a "webinar" the other day to try and make sense of the limitations and horrendous in-accuracies of the timeline, layout engine and export options....Also an embarrassment, the people leading the webinar focussed purely on the "new" features and skirted around the glaring issues with the fundamentals.They even had problems I could see and hear them fretting when things were not working properly, but they moved swiftly on... poor show.

HOW can you have a piece of software that relies totally on a timeline, but has laughable scaling and positional tools, and inaccurate rounding of numbers in your code?

For example If you drag a buttons timeline bar from the left edge, it starts to scale slightly from the opposite edge (a rounding error in the appalling code no doubt).

If you activate an item in the timeline it "forgets" you've asked it to remain for the rest of the timeline.. and starts creating a gap at the end

This leads to things like continue buttons suddenly disappearing at the end of a slide leaving users totally stuck (which a TOTALLY fundamental to a linear learning experience)

The dragging and dropping of elements on the timelime is woefull, things jiggle about, the slide length changes, gaps appear, weird scaling starts to happen... the list goes on.

And worst of all some times it is actually just the rendering to the screen UI is bugged and inaccurate and if you run it the gaps aren't there.. this is appaling adobe, and I think you know it.

How could your beta testers not notice these problems, how could your focus groups not bring this to your attention. How do some people support this software?

The ONLY reason that their is an audience of users who actually "like" captivate is they are users with no alternative option or prior experience of how software can be accurate intuitive and helpful.(like the majority of Adobe's other software)

Captivate is typically POOR e-learning software, for an audience who unfortunately don't know any better or can't access anything else, and have to learn to jump through hoops, limit their creativity, limit the possibilities of e-learning and create barriers to software development.

Shame on you Adobe.... Did you just buy this software from someone else and re-skin it, because it certainly feels that way, this isn't the quality I'm used to from and adobe tool.

Unfortunately I don't have the time to go into:

• You cant drag a slide thumbnail in filmstrip view in a long course, without it dropping in a random place, again poor rounding code, the drop target is Waaaayyyy off
• The terrible export options and reliance on old technology
• The "render it all to images" method of getting it to work as html
• The IE 9 or above limitation when nothing special needs to be happening with the html
• The lack of firefox support?
• The adobe help assistant who hung up on me when I started to ask too many questions.
• The inability to relink images or sounds or refresh the dynamic link to things in the library.

I don't have the time because I'm responding to a clients query as to why sometimes the audio narration doesn't play on all bullets or slides... My answer?? I have no Idea, its all lined up and imported correctly, but sometimes I'm afraid it just doesn't play... no-one knows why.. its just a bit rubbish.. Sorry.

Time to bin and burn it adobe... burn it with fire.

P.S Here's some imaginary gaps for ya!.. yeah!.. It might mean those buttons will disappear at the end of the slide... It might not... you guess!!